Guardien

QR

Fun fact: Lightform has no rooting, you can use Solar flare, or any other power, on the move.

Flying in with photon seekers in hot pursuit is an entertaining way of getting a spawns attention (Quantum Flight especially).

I can confirm that the click buff Secondary Mutation power does NOT carry over into the forms. It does however reappear when you return to human form (ie. the buff isn't lost when you shapechange, just suppressed somehow). I suspect it has something to do with the rikti monkey form "buff", which locks you out of the forms for its duration. I hope this is not "working as intended", as until now all click buffs have carried over into the forms...

Hardly ever. I have it on my DA/FM tanker, to help out his relatively low S/L resists, and on my MA/SR scrapper, to open up weave for soft-capping. Granted, that works out to 1/2 of my tankers, and 1/5 of my scrappers, but still, I seem to find better powers to take in lieu.

For me, tanking is a playstyle, not limited to one AT. It's a simple and fun playstyle. 1) lead the charge. 2) protect your allies. 3) sacrifice: I'm the only one "allowed" to die. Granted, Tankers accomplish this better than most but from time to time I've done it on all my toons.

Don't get me wrong, it's not purely an altruistic playstyle, but it's perhaps the most heroic, and that's the enjoyment for me. It's also why I enjoy having a good tanker on my teams - seeing them be all heroic is inspiring!

Sure, I do damage. Lots even (Fire secondary & APP). And sometimes the sacrifice isn't my death, but just doing something else that helps the team triumph without personal fanfare. But still, there's a unique satisfaction to seeing my health being the ONLY one that dips to dangerously low levels.

QR:

Just wanted to add that with the inherent now carrying over, it's not uncommon to be at the Kheld resist cap (85%) to all but psi while on a team in dwarf form. Most people also pick white dwarf as the better for tanking because the heal doesn't require a tohit check (ie. more reliable), in addition to the taunt effect in Dwarf Flare. Black Dwarf's do ok though, and with a bit of support can be real monster scrankers.

SB (and Kinetics in general) can be a tough introduction to a support toon. I know I hated playing one, to the point that I deleted my level 50 ill/kin (this was before we could purchase more character slots, or move characters to other servers).
That said, you're playing a support toon. Your role on the team is to buff/heal your allies, and/or debuff or otherwise impede your enemies. Your teammates shouldn't have to say please and thank you just to get you to do your job. If I was the team leader, I would make it clear that you should either buff, or leave - unless you were obviously very new to the game. I was just a team member...dunno...SB is good, but I can get by without it.

To the OP:

Things to keep in mind when playing a human-only PB:
- your melee attacks out-damage your ranged attacks by a significant margin (I am including photon seekers, dawn strike, and solar flare here).
- +recharge is your friend, even if it's just to get lightform back sooner.
- lightform rocks.
- lack of mez protection outside of lightform sucks.
- some people call you a blapper, but in terms of survivability/damage output you're more of a scranker (shields +dull pain clone + self heal).
- teams make you awesome (as of i13, this is true of all khelds, not just human-only). on the right team your damage will approach scrapper levels, as should your survivability. Solo...meh, you can, but kheldians in general are really meant to team (look at their inherent). as every mission YOU have will contain a void, quantum, or cyst, you'll find you can't solo some of the higher difficulty settings, despite being able to survive them easily on teams.
- you won't feel the "slot crunch". you also won't be as versatile as a bi or tri-former. even with the slot crunch, a tri-former ("properly" slotted) will out damage you (nova form is that good), and out survive you (dwarf form is that good). you will have the opportunity to pick power pools that may be more beneficial to the team tho. at least, that is my experience with two tri-forms and a human only.

As a rule, only click powers (and the inherent) carry over into the forms. Ally buffs carry over as well. The inherent has become a huge factor (before i13 it didn't carry over).
Orbiting Death is very good, but it's probably best not to take it right away, as it does aggro things to you exceptionally well . Later on, it allows you to focus your attacks on Lts+, as minions will get chewed down, especially if you've also got inky aspect running.
As soon as you can get Nova, slot those powers, they exceed your human only powers by far. After you get Dwarf form, you can (at your discretion) split your slots between the forms, but really, as long as you team, Nova is usually your dominant form. Personally, Dwarf is the last form I slot powers on ( I slot the form immediately tho).
The Kheldian damage cap is 400%, or +300% (100% being your base damage). Warshades are one of the few ATs/powersets that can potentially self cap (double mire + nova form).
For a first time WS, honestly, the best thing is to experiment. Different tactics work with different teams (definitely team tho), and in different situations. There's really no other AT/powerset that plays quite like them. In general, count to 2 after the tank engages a spawn. That will save you from unwanted aggro, but there will still be sufficient enemies to buff from. Also, going from Dwarf/Nova TO human is faster than going FROM human to either form, or from form to form. Tri-form is your best bet in the long run, there is really no benefit to not going that route, save preference.

With regards to binds/macros not working for you: for whatever reason, the game sees copy/pasted double quotes (") as two single quotes (''), which breaks the bind/macro...hmmm...it's possible I have that backwards BUT the point is, you might have to type the bind/macro, not copy/paste it.
I cannot overstate the importance of using either a bind or macro to manage shifting forms (ie. changing your default power tray so that the powers for whatever form you're in are on the default tray). Without them, I can see the forms being unplayable. I know before the improvements in i13, it caused several players I know personally to not play kheldians at all (human-only was...less viable back then).

First of all, congratulations if you've managed to read the thread this far...

While I do think there is a problem with game-play at levels 1-22, I don't think the problem has Endurance Recovery at it's core. There are a number of very significant factors that all contribute to low level characters having perceived endurance issues. IMO biggest of these is game pace: no one wants to stop mid fight, everyone wants to steam-roll from one spawn to the next. I'm going to avoid delving into the psychological reasons behind this tendency, but hopefully you'll concede that it exists. The result is that we push the pace, spamming powers until we're literally out of endurance. Next is accuracy: the more often your attacks/powers miss, the more endurance you waste. Then comes damage (per attack): the more attacks required to defeat a spawn, the less endurance you have available for the next spawn - which you want to get to as soon as possible given the steam-roll tendency. Lastly, we have what I would call "slot starvation": limited enhancement slots per power, and limited bonuses from whatever enhancements you choose to slot (compared to what you can get after level 22).

Stamina, if taken at level 20, puts a band-aid on the problem until level 22 when SO enhancement slotting becomes possible, and ultimately "fixes" the problem.

Obviously, the dev's can't (and shouldn't) do anything to "fix" our steam-rolling desires, so that leaves accuracy and damage. The dev's have made some effort here, essentially removing the AT damage modifier from levels 1 - 10, as well as adding the VET attacks, and more recently with "Beginner's Luck" which effectively negates the wasted endurance from certain missed attacks.

I think the next step should be to adjust (increase) the bonus values from lower level enhancements (TOs and DOs) as suggested earlier in the thread. As this will certainly result in a faster leveling speed for characters, it may require a downward adjustment in how much xp is rewarded at those levels too, although with improved steam-rolling capability, I don't think most players will complain. It might take MORE missions to level, but if you get through those missions faster, is that really such a bad thing?

Here's the catch though: we can never steam-roll fast enough! There are
scrappers out there with Quick Recovery, Stamina, and Physical Perfection. Probably other +endurance or +recovery powers too. Warshades (myself included) that fire Stygian Circle "just to top up the tank". Some characters might even wish they had bigger attacks to leverage all that endurance against! And it's not just endurance we see this with. We have soft-capped defenses, resistance-capped toons galore, damage-cap, recharge cap, etc etc etc...all in pursuit of ONE thing: the steam-roll. It won't matter if we increase the recovery rate, or the total amount of endurance, we'll still want more. Sure, HOW that steam-roller gets used varies (farming, soloing AVs, Mo*TFs, etc), but we all strive towards it. Raising the lower limits just pushes us closer to the upper limit.

Honestly though, there's so many work-arounds to the perceived endurance issue (the best being: TEAMS!), that I don't think we'll see any action on it by the dev's. Just have to wait and see what they do in CoH2.

It's the steam-roll effect. Mire to buff damage, to defeat enemies quicker, so you have bodies for pets and stygian circle, so you have endurance to mire, to defeat enemies...etc etc etc. People LOVE this. A good team does it, the WS can do regardless of a team. Kinectics probably gets the same glowy reccomendation (fulcrum shift, speed boost, etc). As good as PBs are (I have 3 of em!), they don't steam-roll like a WS. Simple.

I too had a hard time with tanking at first. I can't tell you how many false starts (deleted) I had. Then an interesting thing happened: I got my first 50, and started a Kheldian. White Dwarf (lvl 20 Peacebringer power) basically gave me what I needed: a simplistic bare-bones tank. Teleport, Heal, Taunt, AoE, ST, high resists. It still took me a while to learn to use those tools, but having essentially instant access to a base tank was exactly what I needed. For the life of me I couldn't get the powers picked/slotted properly in a tank before that, to the point that I too thought: I am not a tanker-type. Lo-and-behold though, my Dwarf soon had me tanking in spite of myself. "lvl xx team lf tanker" "I can tank!" Soon after getting that PB to lvl 50 I dove into a pure tanker: Dark Armor/Fire/Fire whom I enjoy immensely As for the gorilla vs. gazelle thing: *shrugs* I set a pretty mean pace, and used to race fire/kin farmers till they stopped inviting me .

Just because Dwarf is your best choice when tanking, doesn't mean it has to limit your options. If I am the lead tank on a team, I will mix things up depending on the situation. Examples: zoom in with quantum flight, ignoring the alpha strikes entirely, un-phasing into Dawn Strike, pop a blue and turtle up in dwarf while the team cleans up leftovers. Or, lead off with the KnockDown AoE of Nova (forget the name) followed by the cone, drop to human for some solar flare goodness, then turtle up. PBs have more than enough tools to survive the alpha strikes, dwarf is just the best.

Lightform: I have it on both my tri-form PB and human only PB. Obviously, it gets used a lot more on my human only . Its usage, like any tier9/godmode power, is highly situational. I'll use my tri-form for examples, as human only uses it basically whenever it is up in combat. I use it most often to become a near-indestructible healer (which plays into your question about Glowing Touch). 85% resists, mez protection, and a decent heal other ability, on top of my own significant self heals. I can stand in the thick of things healing those that need it when no one else (save maybe a tank or scrapper with medicince pool) could. When is that necessary? When all other healing on the team has been killed, and the thick of it is piling up on the survivors . I also occasionally use it preemptively before using Dawn Strike (nuke), especially on smaller teams where the striker/tanker roll is on me already. Or any situation where end drain threatens to drop me out of dwarf form but I still need the protection of dwarf.

Presence Pool: I can't think of a single toon of mine that's taken anything from it and kept it. 'Nuff said?

Glowing Touch vs. Medicine Pool: The heal itself isn't as strong, but can't be interrupted. Generally I don't take a Pool power that I have access to already in my primary/secondary...so unless there is something else in the Medicine Pool you're going for, or some set that will work with a Pool power and not Glowing Touch, I don't see much point in taking Medicine over Glowing Touch. I say take Glowing Touch. A little bit of healing here and there is actually all most teams really need. Sure, engaging a fresh spawn at less that full health scares some players, but...it does make things more entertaining ;D.

I've never heard anyone, in game, say anything one way or another about the "epicness" of Kheldians. I have heard people, in game, complain about cysts, but I usually attribute that to either ignorance, or a few bad experiences.